Amazon, Microsoft under UK regulator's eye as cloud market probe confirmed

Watch out, Amazon and Microsoft – the UK’s competition watchdog this morning confirmed it will investigate the big cloud infrastructure services players. The move follows a recommendation from telecoms regulator, Ofcom. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it will carry out its own scrutiny into public cloud …

[Dinanziame]

Google must feel left out

[Anonymous Coward]

There are other cloud providers, but I often get a Father Ted vibe when thinking about them. "There's no demand for that because it's s---e".

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously

Yes, let's investigate cloud providers we're there is competition between AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle, but let's ignore the monopolies in water, gas, train operators, etc. Oh yes, sorry, those monopolies were created by the government so that's OK then!

[Arthur Daily]

Clouds are supposed to be portable service

Clouds are supposed to be completely portable and the same. Don't like one - easy , move to another that's cheaper/better. That was how Gartner and the like sold it to CEO's in the early days. Then clouds needed certification levels - with the assumption that they must be OK if they are the mega players. The rot started when they demanded 12 months to five year in advance. Then CEO's thought hey lets create something, and say it is not capex or opex, but leasex. Sorry leasing is recurrent opex, and accounts has a mental in paying opex in advance. In realty, the cons being done now - YOU need a broker because nobody else knows if your deal is value for money. The term UPLIFT - if you live in a country with a weak currency - well you are up the creek. But now as people are hooked, key talent retrenched, it is 'Too hard' to bring it back in house - so they say. Yes, they are now abusing their market power, and should be investigated. Better yet, mandate they may NOT use the cloud, and all entities on them in annual reports list 'Leased Contracted services'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Clouds are supposed to be portable service

At no stage did anybody (sane) say clouds are supposed to be completely portable and the same. Why should they be? Is Windows supposed to be completely portable and the same as Linux? Oracle and MS SQL? C# and Python? Even “commodity” services such as electricity offer differentiated benefits (Octopus does cheap rate charging for EVs overnight) - should they not be allowed to do that?

The fact is, all tech stacks try to offer some sort of differentiation to attract users - and cloud is no different. If a specific cloud provider offers a capability that nobody else does, you still have a choice - use it and get the business benefits of quick adoption/time to delivery, or build your own equivalent capability which gives you more ownership but takes longer.

Either way, doing one doesn’t rule out the other choice - the opportunity cost still exists, just at the point you decide to switch. This is still better than traditional IT SI’s that sign multi-year contracts, then charge for every single change…